Sitcoms are the only type of entertainment I can think of that get more entertaining the less you pay attention. If you actually sit and watch – really watch, not just look at – most sitcoms, they become infuriatingly un-funny. But if you just sit back and stare at the television, you’ll find yourself grinning like an idiot, oblivious to the world around you, even as the show drones on with narcoleptic jokes.

Married couples struggle with their sex lives. Men fart. Mothers-in-law are annoying. These are the tiles of the sitcom’s Rubik’s cube. They get combined and reconstituted in a thousand different ways, and if you don’t watch too closely, you can actually believe you are looking at something new and distinct each time.

There is one crucial device that allows sitcoms to keep presenting themselves so cheerfully in your living room; the laugh track. The next time you get a chance, turn on a sitcom and then go stand in an adjacent room. Don’t watch the show, don’t listen to the jokes; just let the laugh track come through (this is a little like blurring your vision to see one of those 3D Eye posters). Before long you’ll hear a burst of vacant laughter reminiscent of a crowd of monkeys. That’s the laugh track.

First used in the 1950s on the since-forgotten Hank McCune Show, the laugh track quickly became a staple of most comedy shows. It’s inventor, Charley Douglass, was an engineer at CBS who’d worked as a radio operator in the WWII and studied at CalTech and MIT. Speculation abounds about where the original laughs came from; some say it was from a Marcel Marcuea routine (with no performance dialogue, it was easier to slice and loop the audience reaction). See here and here for more on the laugh track’s history.

Since it’s invention, Douglass’ “Laugh Machine” has evolved from an organ-like box with pedals and rows of keys into digital libraries of quips, squeals and guffaws. But the technique for creating laugh tracks is still pretty mysterious. The profession of “Laugh Man” hasn’t been eliminated; weaving the fake laughs in with the real (if there are any) appears to be more of an art than a science.

But my problem with laugh tracks isn’t the audience’s deception the show’s producers. It’s that I can’t help being affected by that deception. I’ll face the television with a steely resolve not to laugh at things I don’t find funny, but for some reason – maybe it’s conditioning – I can’t stop myself. When the TV audience laughs, I feel the urge to laugh too.

And there’s something really frustrating about watching a show you know isn’t funny and breaking into an unconscious grin. It’s confusing; your brain and your face can’t agree on what merits a smile. It’s like drugs.

So, why does canned laughter work the way it does? Some say the principle of social proof is behind it. Basically, the idea is that one way humans decide what’s right and wrong is to see what other people think.

For example, if most people at the dinner table are slurping their soup, it’s probably OK for me to slurp mine. Big deal, you say, that sounds just like peer pressure. But social proof can be even more powerful than that. One study (Craig & Prkachin (1978)) showed that participants who were administered electrical shocks felt less pain if they were in the presence of others who looked like they weren’t feeling pain.

And that’s just my point; I watch and watch these shows but I never feel the electrical shocks. I feel I am being cheated, and the laugh track is behind it.

The problem is that the laugh track isn’t really social proof at all. The laugh track doesn’t prove that others are laughing, and therefore we should be, too. In fact, it proves just the opposite; if you hear canned laughter, it’s because no one (at least, no one currently) is laughing. And though today’s laugh tracks are certainly better than they were in the 50s and 60s, they’re still easily discernible. Not only are they fake social proof, there also not very good fakes.

So you have to wonder, how bad could the laugh track be and still work? Well, the laughter on 1950s sitcoms was ridiculously bad, often the same audience reaction, paired with applause, would be reused many times in an episode. And people still laughed (and still laugh) at those.

What if you replaced the laughter on the laugh track with some other vaguely similar sound, like, say, hyenas? Would people laugh, or circle around the weakest person in the room and kill him?

If you’ve learned anything today about the power of social proof and the laugh track, then you exactly what they’d do: both.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 29th, 2004 at 10:07 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.